Out of the Shadow and Into the Sun: Hikage's past
by Elma Cirfe
Summary: She was abandoned at an orphanage. She was bullied by the other children for her eyes and her hair, but mostly for what she was: a husk of memories, without the feelings felt by all others. Without emotion. She was alone. She didn't care of course, but she never did. But life continued on regardless. Hikage's backstory, more detail inside. T for occasional F-bomb and violence.


_Since PBS (Plot Bunnit Syndrome) has got the better of me for the third time in as many days, here's the third of the stories I'll be writing to stop my head hurting. _

_It'll mainly focus on Hikage's backstory, though there will be other stuff along the way. From what I remember from Burst and the Anime, she starts in an Orphanage, then moves onto the streets, joins Hinata's gang, goes rouge after *that*, then is scouted by Hebijo, then finally recruited by them. I'll definitely write up to that point, but I may go further and carry on up to the end of SK2-Deep Crimson (the game will hopefully be out in the West by the time I manage to write that far). _

_However, I will be using the game 'I have never felt emotions' rather than the anime 'I've got a lid on all my emotions since they just get in the way of fighting', since it better describes the story and gives me more to go on. I'll also being using a mix of both the Hanzo arc and the Hebijo arc from Burst, as well as the anime, to add scenes to the story, as well as for Canon reference (since the Canon in all 3 are different to a fairly large extent)._

_EDIT: I played Burst through again, turns out that Hikage ran away when she was 8, as opposed no 'no age specified'. So, some age changes will be coming to this chapter and chapter 2. Please PM/review and tell me if there are any inconsistencies with the new ages (eg her being 5, then 10, then 7.) Also, to those of you worrying that I won't continue this, don't! I am and I will, but I have exms coming up soon, so I won't be able to get the chapter out before May at the absolute earliest._

_Anyway, let's get on with this._

* * *

**Chapter One: …**

My first actual memory was of before the orphanage. A glimpse of black hair and blue eyes here, a sound of shouting or a smell of burning there. Not much, but enough to know that I had parents. But why was I here, in the orphanage? Were they dead? Were they too poor to care for me? Did they go missing, or leave the country? Did they not care about me?

It didn't matter either way: I was here, they were not. That was that. Nothing would change that. So my first memory that I truly remember? It was one from the orphanage. The sound of children laughing. At the time, I had no idea what that was. Laughter? A strange name for a strange sound, one I was unable to recreate.

It didn't take me very long to understand that I, a girl, barely four years old, had nothing of what people call 'Emotion'. Happiness, Sadness, Joy, Anger, Eagerness, Regret, Hope, Depression, Relief, Foreboding: the list went on and on. 'But what are emotions?' I would ask one of the older women who ran the orphanage-once I was old enough to speak.

A feeling? What is that?

A state of mind? What do you mean?

It is what it is? That doesn't answer my question.

And so, every day, at least once, I would ask, 'What are emotions?' And every day, there would be a different answer. A different one, yes, but never the one I was looking for. Never one I could relate to or understand. Never the right one.

And so, for the time I was there, it became almost like a ritual. Other children came and went, other people who ran or helped out around the orphanage came and went, but I remained here, being what you would call 'Stoic and Impassive', the same as ever, growing physically, growing mentally, but not growing emotionally.

* * *

I suppose you could say I was bullied a lot by the other children. They bullied me about my lack of emotion, though this never bothered me. After all, why try and make someone angry when that person can't get angry?

The bullied me about my hair. I've never found a problem with it, and since I refused to have it cut back then, for reasons I can't remember now, it was nearly as long as I was tall. Not long enough for it to drag behind me all over the floor, but easily enough that there was about two feet of excess behind me when I sat down. So, every time I did, someone would always be stepping on it when I was trying to get up. It hurt a lot-emotion and pain were two completely separate things-but, in the same way that their bullying me about my emotions didn't affect me, this didn't either. Obviously I wanted them to stop, as I didn't like pain-and still don't-but they would only pull harder. Then again, nobody else at the orphanage had green hair, and perhaps they were what you would call 'Jealous'.

They bullied me about my face as well. Obviously, I didn't care, but even I can see now why having snake-like eyes and walking around with my tongue poking out would warrant this, though I couldn't then. Then again, maybe they were just 'bored' of bullying me about my emotions or my hair, and decided to change the topic. In any case, it never worked, and after a year or two of bullying me about various things, they stopped. They never accepted me, and they didn't even acknowledge me, but they weren't wasting their breath any more.

* * *

I was only 5 when something changed. A boy arrived at the orphanage. This itself wasn't too special-new children came to the orphanage all the time-but this boy was different. When he was with the others, he would behave like them, though he didn't really fit in with them, and they shunned him most of the time. However, when they weren't around, he would talk to me. Not about emotion or my face, but just talk. He didn't talk at me either, like some of the adults did, but to me, as if I was actually another person rather than something in the background. He was so different from the rest of the other children that I remember him even now.

The first Christmas he was here was the first one I ever got anything. The new boy gave me a small box and asked me to open it. Inside were two long ribbons, a slightly darker shade of green that my hair. When I asked him what it was for, he said that 'I didn't have to go around all the time with my hair dragging on the ground', so he'd got me this so that I could have my hair in a single ponytail or, if I wanted to, two. I chose to alternate between the two most days, though I always took the ribbons off before I went to sleep. That Christmas was the first true act of kindness that anyone had ever shown me, and when I told him this, he just blushed and said that it was nothing. But it was something, and, for the first time, here was something that I understood and he did not. I hadn't got him anything, but he was fine with that.

That night, before I went to bed, he turned to me and asked if I knew the meaning of the word 'friend'. I told him that, while I had a vague idea, I didn't know. He then asked if I knew the meaning of the word 'friendship'. I told him that I didn't know. He then asked me if I had ever had a friend. I told him that, taking the meaning of the word literally, I had never had what he would call a 'true' friend, and, as such, had never experienced what he called 'friendship'. At the exact moment after I told him that, he promised me that he would always be my friend, always, no matter what, and said that the ribbon he had given me were both a sign and a token of our friendship.

* * *

About 2 years later, I remember that I woke up one morning with all my hair cut off. Apparently, one of the boys had got hold of an electric razor and had crept up on me while I was asleep. The curtain (by now far longer than my height of about four feet) of green was still on the bed, underneath where I had been lying. I just stared at it, like I didn't know what it was. Then, I noticed that the ribbons-the dark green ribbons that I had kept for nearly two years, the signs and symbols of our friendship-though I still didn't truly understand the meaning of the word-had been sliced into pieces, and these lay scattered all over the floor of my room. That was when the boy came in.

He saw my shaved head and ran over to me. He had asked me if I knew who did this, if I knew how long it would take to grow back, and so on. I answered him as best I could, though even I had no idea how long it would take to grow back. Then, he saw the pieces of the ribbons on the floor, and the emotion that I recognised as 'Anger' came into his face. It only showed itself as a tightening of his jaw, hardness in his eyes and his curled fists, but it was the angriest I'd ever seen him. In the end, I gathered up the curtain of green strands on my bed (after getting changed into day clothes) and we made our way downstairs to the main office. I didn't mind either way, but he insisted that whoever did this had to be punished in somehow.

So, we went in, and as he had expected, the boy was found and punished twofold-once for the trick, and once for the razor (which still sits to this day, as far as I know, in the bottom-right drawer in the desk in the main office). Needless to say, the boy who was punished, as well as his friends, were angry.

* * *

It was about two weeks later. My hair had grown back, though it was far, far shorter now than it was before, but it wouldn't stop growing. That night, I heard a lot of thumping and shouting, followed by someone crying out loudly. This went on, though the cries got quieter each time until they were no more than a feeble whimper. At this point, I decided to go downstairs and see what was happening. That night was a first for many things. Anger was the least important of those.

I don't remember much else of that night. I remember walking into my 'friend's' room, only to find blood-in no small amount, though hardly a deep pool- and the shaking wreck that was all that remained of the boy who had called me friend. I hadn't truly understood the meaning of the word,, but at that time, something began pulsing in my chest, pressure began to build behind my eyes, and I identified this feeling as anger. No, that was far too soft a word for it.

* * *

From that point on, there was nothing I could remember until the next morning. I woke up and felt something next to me. Looking over, it turned out to be the boy. You might think this very odd, but bear in mind that we were both seven at the time. My breasts had started to develop (though not much compared to what they are now), but I didn't feel any embarrassment. I poked his face, and he woke up slowly, looking at me with blank eyes before he realised where he was. He shimmied out of the bed and fell onto the floor, but stood up instantly and backed off, his face a deep red.

We talked for a bit, and he calmed down after a moment, but it was only after several minutes that both of us noticed the sheer amount of dried blood, all of his clothes and on my hands. Some of the wounds he had received last night had opened when he fell out of the bed, and he said that they were quite painful. I didn't recall where or when I had got this much blood on my hands, but it couldn't have been from carrying the boy-a single piece of the night I remembered t this time was the fact that his shirt was dry with crusted blood when I carried him upstairs. So, after getting changed (and the boy looking away, his face red with what he called 'embarrassment') we went downstairs.

At first, everything seemed normal. Then, my friend noticed that the doors of some of the rooms were either ajar or wide open, which was strange considering the fact that they were normally kept closed most of the time. Entering one and turning the light on, we saw nothing but smashed furniture and a few bloodstains. Each room was the same, and my friend kept getting edgier and edgier s we went through all the rooms, and not a sign of the boys remained, save for the few personal possessions that they all had. We reached the end of the corridor and walked down again, this time to the first floor. The sight that greeted us left an odd feeling in my stomach. 'Discomfort', the boy later said.

* * *

I suppose I should give you a rough map of the orphanage. On the ground floor was the entrance, the office and the other stuff that us children had no interest in or need for, aside from the sick bay. On the first floor was the room where we ate, as well as a small library (mostly filled with picture books I had never even glanced at, though I knew how to read perfectly fine), a couple of rooms filled with toys, and the entrance onto the garden (the ground and the back of the building was higher than it was at the front). The Second floor was where the boys slept, and the Third floor was reserved for the girls. Simple, but it worked.

* * *

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. The corridor leading from the stairs to the dining room (the stairs to the ground floor were at the other end) was covered in splatters of blood, most long dried, but a few still fairly fresh. The playrooms on either side were untouched and empty, as was the garden. The dining room itself was clean, save for the trail of blood leading to the stairs at the other end of the room. We followed it down, the boy clinging on to my arm for support-he didn't like the sight of blood, nor of anything else that came from inside a living being.

The trail led to the sick bay. My 'friend' knocked on the door and slowly opened it. The room had about twenty or thirty beds, though most of them were never used, since there were never usually that many people ill at the same time. Today, though, every bed was full. The boys who lived on the second floor-every one of them-were currently in here. Some were being treated for minor wounds, such as bruises or scrapes, but at least half were bleeding, some only lightly from a cur to the arm, others freely from a deep cut to the head or several slashes to the torso. Four or five of them-the ones that had led the bullying all those years ago, one of them the boy who had shaved off all my hair-were almost unrecognisable beneath the amount of blood-soaked bandages covering them. They lived, though one of them was now partially blind in his left eye, and another walked with a constant limp in his right leg. Neither of them has, to my knowledge, recovered from either injury.

As I took this in, and the boy beside me gaped at what lay before him, one of the nurses noticed me and hurried over to me. She asked me if I knew who did this, and I said-truthfully-that I didn't: I still had yet to 'join the dots'. Call me stupid if you will, but a lack of emotions gets in the way of other things as well. She then asked the boy next to me, but he didn't answer. It was then that she noticed the blood on his shirt, as well the multitude of shallow cuts on his arms and legs. She quickly pulled him inside and sat him down on a chair next to the door, then began to treat his injuries. She didn't even notice the blood on my hands-even dried under my fingernails, and splashed up my arms like some sort of strange painting, until I asked if my friend was going to be alright.

She looked at my hands, then at the boys who were laid out on the beds, then at the boy sat on the chair next to me, then back to my hands again. The next instant, I found myself thrown in front of the woman who ran the place-she was about forty, with slightly greying hair-and found myself sitting there while the nurse told the other woman that she thought that I was the one who had don all this. It was at this point where I finally managed to understand the significance of everything, as well as the reason why I had no memories of the previous night.

* * *

I was the one who had done this.

I, the girl with no emotions and the snake-like face, had lost my head in my anger and had lashed out at those who dared put me in such a state, and repaid them for their wrongdoings in full.

I, the one who had only one person who truly cared for her, the one who had been bullied for years by those who thought they were better than me, had snapped and put them in their proper place: at the bottom of the food chain, below even what a snake would not be caught dead eating.

I, a seven year old girl, had committed the largest act of non-lethal violence in the recorded history of Japan, and with good reason: the one who cared for me, the one who was with me, the one who had once claimed he 'loved' me-what a strange feeling- had been beaten to within an inch of his bruised and bloody life.

And did I care? Did I care even a small bit about the children lying in the next room, some of whom were now covered in scars, both physical and mental, that would never heal? Did I care for the group of people who dared to injure the one thing that I 'cherished'?

Not a bit. Not one single _fucking_ bit.


End file.
